David Weldon: “I practiced medicine for 15 years before I was elected to the House of Representatives. I still see patients. I see them…”

“I practiced medicine for 15 years before I was elected to the House of Representatives. I still see patients. I see them once a month. I want to address the issue in this rule of medical malpractice reform. A lot of people when they debate the issues surrounding the need for medical malpractice reform and reining in all of these plaintiffs' attorneys who are advertising on television, a lot of focus is on the size of the judgments and the costs, the legal fees associated with this system. But the real burden on our health care system is the high cost of defensive medicine. What is defensive medicine? I can tell you exactly what defensive medicine is because I practiced it for 15 years. I spent daily between $300 and $3,000 a day unnecessarily. Primary care providers, they do not like to talk about this because it gets them in trouble with their insurance companies, not with their medical malpractice insurance companies but with the Blue Cross/Blue Shields and the Aetnas.”